Monday, October 06, 2014

Gone from Facebook

Mostly likely due to complaints from a "liberal" who classily smeared me as a "Reptard," Facebook blew up my Vastleft Facebook account and forced me to convert it to a page.

It appears all my threads were blown into oblivion, including the excellent discussion over the weekend on counterproductive antiwar memes, which I was planning to adapt into my first post here in a long while. Now, FB is trying to sell me access to users.

Under certain circumstances, you won’t have to make the individual responsibility payment. This is called an “exemption.” You may qualify for an exemption if... you’re a member of a recognized religious sect with religious objections to insurance, including Social Security and Medicare

Putting aside the cheap risibility in favor of empathetically considering the impact of Erectile Dysfunction on men and their partners is a tough sell. With America's for-profit insurance model, it's a tough buy, as well.

Many insurance companies don't cover these so-called "lifestyle drugs," and those that do only pay[] for four pills a month.

If you or your partner would like to use these scientific advances to maintain potency, you can have sex only as often as corporate bureaucrats say you're entitled to… unless you have scads of discretionary cash.

Cialis, Levitra, Staxyn, Stendra, and Viagra work by a similar mechanism to cause erections.

Let's look into what the first drug in the list costs citizens whose sexual health could benefit from it.

It's difficult to locate and link to accurate pricing of prescription medicines, especially in the world of online ED drug sales, which is teeming with fraud, as heir apparent to the old "Spanish fly," offering placebos or Christ-knows-what to poor dupes—scams that launched a zillion spam messages.

This site provides actual prescription drug price information for my home state.

30 (i.e., about once daily per month) 20mg Cialis costs about $1,061 in the Boston area, or about $35 per tablet.

If your insurance allows for 4 tablets with a co-pay, and again many insurance plans won't pay for these drugs at all, it will cost a tad under a grand a month for daily use.

The first few major health insurance plans I found via Google search said they didn't or may not cover Cialis. Those that do cover it require copays even for those small numbers of authorized pills, and brand-name drug copays are typically $40 or more.

At that price a daily dose would be $360-$450 per month, but according to the MA drug-price site, it would actually cost $983.36/month for either 25mg or the "recommended" 50mg doses, about $33/day, with no information available on the price of 100mg Viagra.

But the principle remains the same: our current health-access system impinges on everyone's sexual health and freedom.

* * *

ED medication isn't necessarily an unalloyed good, which could be said of birth control pills and devices as well. There can be medical and other side-effects to using them. But decisions on access to them are in the hands of people who shouldn't make those decisions.

There is also the subject of the research incentives and price-setting power of drug companies. How do we get them to invest in new cures and not to charge exploitively when their research bears fruit? Or do we increasingly or wholly replace the research-for-profit model with a social-good model?

By whatever financial model medicines are invented and manufactured, there is no virtue in having a parasitic, profit-seeking choke point between their making and their prospective use.
National health policy could change the drug-development model dramatically, but with or without such change, allowing employers and insurers to play God with our reproductive life is demeaning and harmful, no matter which gender's treatments are curtailed.

* * *

What we have here are two wayward, government-coddled institutions—religion and corporations—sticking their noses where they don't belong.

By tradition, we can't and don't say "of course religion is founded on mumbo jumbo, and it's rife with misogynistic and homophobic rules." Even many skeptics pooh-pooh having a national dialogue that admits that religion is malarkey at its core and therefore should have absolutely zero standing in matters such as reproductive rights.

So, we constrain ourselves to occasional potshots at easy targets like the Phelps Family or Hobby Lobby, and distract ourselves with irrelevancies like "Look, over there, someone got Viagra!"

If we did away with, or at least chipped away at, the cultural norm that insists religion is a sacred function we simply have to respect, religious exemptions for such matters as reproductive rights would be seen in a more accurate light.

And with Obamacare, employers and insurance profiteers are further institutionalized as gatekeepers for all manner of medical needs, with reproductive-health benefits a particular target.

Americans who want fair access to health treatments may wish away this cruel bottleneck, but our president does not:

I have no interest in putting insurance companies out of business. They provide a legitimate service, and employ a lot of our friends and neighbors.

The scope of this problem, corporate control over healthcare access, of course extends far beyond reproductive-related medicine. Alas, outrage over Hobby Lobby has largely not been channeled into support for a real solution: single-payer or nationalized medicine, which would take employers and insurance profiteers out of the equation.